Second-to-last day of April, and isn’t this a nice enough spring-time sunny day to inflict a bit of sarcasm into history? Why, yes it is!
On this day in 1429, Joan of Arc arrived with her brawling bunch to relieve her King’s army at the Siege of Orleans, a sight that prompted the locals to see in her the return of Jesus Christ in the form of a woman. Later on, just to make sure she wasn’t actually a witch, England burned her at the stake. Her death would’ve disproved the witch theory if she hadn’t been rescued and hauled away in a phone booth by a pair of verbally-challenged aspiring musicians.
Crossing over “the pond” to Canada in 1903, where a landslide estimated at 30 million cubic-meters ravaged the town of Frank, in the province of Alberta, claiming 70 lives. To this day, Canadians still debate whether the real tragedy is that 70 of their countrymen couldn’t see a giant freakin’ landslide coming a mile away and just move aside, or that there’s actually a town named Frank.
Adolph “Small ‘Stache” Hitler chose this 1945 day to marry Eva Braun (who displayed impeccably shaven legs) in his private bunker, a pretty short-lived matrimony as it turned out. The couple’s “I Do” came right about the time German armies were signing their surrender to the allied forces in Italy. The Fuhrer mentions the incident in his diary, writing “They won’t be offered a free copy of my wedding-night video”. Nazi leader Joseph Gobels did get a copy, then promptly shot himself in the head.
Deserving of a swift quick him the head themselves were members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, as on this day in 1980 they allowed legendary film director Alfred Hitchcock to pass away without ever having an Oscar bestowed upon him. The same Academy had also used that year’s ceremony to completely ignore another lifetime non-winner, Stanley Kubrick, for his masterpiece “The Shining”. The Best Director Oscar was instead awarded to an actor (Robert Redford) for his first time behind cameras. Some history bites don’t even need additional jokes to be sarcastic…
And finally in 2004, the 29th of April was the rolling out of Oldsmobile’s very last assembled car, after 107 years of encouraging atmospheric pollution. That one unit, a metallic-red Allero, was however conceived, in honor of Thomas Edison, to not ever pollute, nor crash or get stolen: it simply wouldn’t start.
WOW: Words Of (a certain) Wisdom
“It’s not true that I said actors are cattle. I said they should be treated like cattle.”
- Alfred Hitchcock